Science

SCIENCE. The Left view of science, changing enormously with time and place, has proved one of the most difficult if least openly contended philosophical issues of socialism. Within it lie concealed political fault lines that cut across many more obvious differences among radicals and between radicals and US society at large.

Science in the late nineteenth century had an almost magical allure for socialists as well as others. Spiritualists, often inclined toward socialism, viewed the telegraph key, for instance, as a great potential boon to links with the “Other Side,” the ostensibly no-longer-living. Utopian literary works depicted a world where machines did much of the labor and freed humanity for cultured pursuits. Immigrant socialists looked to science for leverage against religious obscurantism and hoped (with Engels) that scientists themselves would naturally favor the social system most suited to their aspirations. Popular scientific explanations, as in the nonsocialist press, took up considerable space in the socialist press.

The new Socialist Party at first seemed to adopt similarly optimistic views. The Charles H. Kerr Company published its Library of Science for Workers, beginning in 1904, a mostly German series of cheaply priced, popular explanations. They made extensive efforts to fit certain notions of science, specifically mental cognition, into a context where the writings of a Joseph Dietzgen made almost cosmic sense of socialist inevitability, generations before Russian devotees of Stalin made similar arguments, adding the certain wisdom of the Party. Arthur Morrow Lewis, one of the party’s most popular lecturers, drew great crowds with his lectures analogizing events in the physical world and events in society as proof of a sort of Marxist Darwinism. For Lewis as for many self-taught working-class intellectuals through the 1920s, Herbert Spencer’s writing supplied the bridge, rendering society an organism whose whole outlived individual parts. Adopting a historical sociology, he sought to demonstrate that progress through human history, and progress in thought, could be demonstrated by the acute observer.

The inherent element of passive confidence in this view, and indeed the entire view itself, was shaken by the outbreak of war in Europe, and even more by the seeming inevitability of US participation. The technologies of destruction, focusing scientific energy upon mass murder of civilian as well as military populations, exposed the barbaric uses of science and the evidently non-utopian future ahead for mankind. A concomitant modernism among intellectuals, especially socialist intellectuals, broke from scientific determinism in the other direction, toward a neoromanticism that scorned nineteenth-century evolutionary assumptions. Einstein’s discovery of E = mc2, by breaking with almost all fixed beliefs in the nature of the universe, may be said to have rendered the older assumptions in some sense scientifically moot. Or so it seemed to many intellectual rebels of the later 1910s and 1920s. That Albert Einstein was himself an ardent socialist seemed to demonstrate the point.
The emergence of the Soviet Union (alongside fascism) in the 1920s and the world depression of the 1930s effected an unprecedented alliance of many scientists and the Left.

These progressive scientists thought the promise of real knowledge, endangered by the dark specter of fascism, might be realized in societies rationally organized. Only the persecutory fury of the Cold War, and disillusionment with the Soviet Union, broke the back of this remarkable rapprochement. Still, the aptly-named journal Science and Society carried many essays, some by prominent scientists or scientific popularists, carried on from its Depression-era beginnings, breaking with Russian dogma when necessary.

The 1920s–1940s leftish tendency had small groups of activist survivors in the 1950s and early 1960s within the science community itself, the most pronounced around the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its supportive Federation of American Scientists. They questioned atomic testing and the entire strategic perspective of defensible war fought with megaweapons. With the emergence of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the “Ban the Bomb” movement of 1960–1962, a handful of scientists lobbied Congress and voiced their opposition in the press to the development of new, destabilizing weapons systems. At the meetings of the American Society of Microbiology, itself linked with the biological-warfare testing of the US government, they protested complicity.

The Vietnam War proved, as in so many areas, to be a watershed. The flagrant misuses of science in that war, from the extraordinary human torture meted out by napalm to the biological warfare of Agent Orange against a million acres of Vietnamese countryside to the “Electronic Battlefield” of apparently perfected technological devastation, became a major issue in the public mind. Soon, Nobel laureates and a legion of scientists signed public protests, once again assuming a leading position among academics, although this time lacking illusions of “scientific socialism” as an alternative in practice somewhere across the globe.

In 1969 the student strike movement hit the scientific field directly, as researchers conducted a one-day stoppage protesting the misuse of scientific knowledge for war purposes. The Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action formed out of meetings at the American Physical Society, creating a nucleus for what would later become Science for the People. Meanwhile, philosophers, literary figures, conservationists, and others raised serious questions about the assumptions of science and the fate of the planet.

Mostly younger scientists created the “radical science movement,” really a loose-knit series of groups and tendencies, of which the Boston-based Science for the People has been the largest and best organized. Younger scientists in particular have engaged in a wide variety of fields. Their roles in providing technical aid to noncapitalist developing countries; in supplying and interpreting data for consumer, environmental, and other anticorporate organizations; and their efforts to encourage responsibility of fellow scientists, such as those who work in weapons laboratories or accepted funding for “Star Wars” projects, have all been vital contributions. In a handful of cases, ongoing organizations have presented their own scientific agendas. Computer Professionals for Peace and the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering among others have repeatedly challenged the format and contents of the national associations at the regular meetings. Science for the People has gained a special prominence by insisting on women’s issues within the scientific community. Only a few scientists have emerged as major public allies of the Left. Stephen Jay Gould, popular analyst of evolutionism among other issues, is perhaps the most formidable example of a supportive presence at Left events and for Left causes.

Widespread skepticism toward supposed scientific solutions to such problems as the technological devastation of wildlife and various threats to the biosphere has renewed a neoromantic (or “pagan”) resistance even to progressive scientific claims. A radical science, now very much in evolution, has been heavily influenced by the predilection for challenging fundamental assumptions and seeking new premises for the uses of knowledge. Anne Fausto-Sterling’s challenging works on science and gender, and Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin’s studies of scientific assumptions, highlight a recent radical approach.

The challenge of rapidly growing plastic waste, of toxicity from a wide variety of sources, flora and fauna extinctions, and above all of global warming prompted a large new generation of scholars trained in sciences or in science journalism and the scholarship of science, to tackle the problems. Marxist sociologist James O’Connor and graduate student collaborators at the University of California Santa Cruz planned a trans-disciplinary journal titled Capitalism Nature Socialism, more popularly CNS, first appearing in 1988. The premise of their work, soon shared by contributors across the world, could be summarized as describing the definitive crisis that capitalism could not resolve, and the necessity for a red-green movement to create a new system. To “end the degradation and destruction and exploitation of the earth,” in O’Connor’s work, would at a minimum require an appropriate analysis of the current social relations of production.

CNS captured the drift of a larger group of Leftwing thinkers. O’Connor, whose previous works included The Fiscal Crisis of the State, emphasized that the State itself had become ever more central to every aspect of production, consumption, public health and community life, so that every struggle for social improvements had become a political struggle. The followers of the Green Party, convinced that capitalism could not reform the growing problems out of existence, constituted by the 1990s a small portion of the socialists who had arrived at the same conclusion. The controversies spurred by extreme weather changes, extinctions and, finally, pandemics linked to human-animal contact, have driven the point home. For twenty-first century socialists, the purported “Green Economy” of capitalism and the Democratic Party offered too little to stem the ongoing crisis, and offered it too late. Marxists share with others, including science-minded liberals and supporters of wildlife of any kind, the aspiration to struggle within and against the State apparatus for a better outcome.

An Ecological Manifesto (2001) by Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy offered a new stage of Left efforts to shift from critique to action. A psychologist and psychoanalyst by training, Kovel emerged as a leader of the Green Party during the 1990s and began placing a vision in the World Social Forum as the gathering place for global efforts to build an international movement around the sharpening crises of the global South. Already a contributor to CNS, in 2003 Kovel assumed editorship of CNS, leaving that post to a collective a few years before his 2020 death. Beyond CNS, the familiar Left journal Monthly Review became, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a center for the scientific discussion of ecological crises, but also of ecology as a Marxist project going all the way back to Marx. According to this view, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and other early writings had already come to terms with the environmental horrors produced by rising industrial capitalism. In their critrique of Proudhon, Marx and Engels had come to the conclusion already that the “conquest of nature” could not be viewed as a foremost human achievement, because capitalism had destroyed so much and bid fair to destroy more and more. Essays in MR had explored various aspects of this topic, and Fred Magdoff’s Hungry for profit: the Agricusiness Threat to Farmers, Food and the Environment (2000) anticipated Foster’s Ecology Against Nature (2002) and his The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020).

Beckwith, Jon.“The Radical Science Movement in the United States.” Monthly Review 37 (July–August 1986).

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Levins, Richard, and Richard Lewontin. Dialectical Biology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.